The Life Cycle of an Application

Persistent Data on the Newton

The remaining piece of the application puzzle is Newton's treatment of data. Rather than storing data in a flat file format, Newton stores data using what are called persistent objects. That is, rather than writing a representation of the data structure to a file, the data structure itself is stored. Thus, the structure is said to persist. These persistent objects are stored in soups. A single soup contains a collection of related frames. For example, the Names application has a Names soup, which contains all the name entries. One entry in that soup would be an individual name card. Soups can also exist on multiple stores; you could have a Names soup on both the Newton and on a PC card.

Sharing Data

An online version of Programming for the Newton using Macintosh, 2nd ed. ©1996, 1994, Julie McKeehan and Neil Rhodes.

Last modified: 1 DEC 1996